Summary of the impact

Dr David Ryan's research at Anglia Ruskin University has achieved impact in the areas of cross-disciplinary events and visual art and music. These include:

• Engaging new audiences through screenings and performances, and encouraging cross-over of public and practitioner audiences from art and music disciplines.
• Introducing new works, repertoire, techniques and approaches to art practitioners and musicians in workshops.
• Keynote contributions and talks for practitioners and the public e.g. at Tate Britain, British Film Institute, Glasgow TV and Film Theatre, Isabella Scelsi Foundation, Rome.
• Dissemination of critical texts and reviews within the fields of art and music, influencing practice.

Underpinning research

David Ryan's research has, since the 1990s, explored approaches to cross-disciplinarity in the arts. Since his appointment at Anglia Ruskin University as Senior Lecturer in 2004, and Reader in Fine Art in 2008, he has consolidated and extended this research through related outputs in different fields: painting, music and moving image as well as critical writing in each of these fields (represented by articles, invited talks, reviews, academic conferences).

Ryan's cross-disciplinary approach stems from an analysis of how space is used in both temporal structures and images, in turn developing methodologies that can be mapped onto sonic or visual structures. His contribution to knowledge in terms of research has been to develop new ways of thinking across diverse media. He has explored these space-time relations within critical reflections on the contemporary situation and history of abstraction within visual art and music. The aims of the research have been to provide a deeper understanding between the arts in practice, in engaging respective music and art audiences.

Examples of this include: `We have Eyes as Well as Ears: Experimental Music and the Visual Arts' in the Ashgate Research Companion to Experimental Music (Ashgate, 2009). This essay uses as a starting point the dialogue between Abstract Expressionism and Experimental Music with the art context for the latter becoming more receptive to sound and performance. Tim Rutherford-Johnson, reviewing the volume in Tempo (University of Cambridge), suggested the value of such a broad approach: "David Ryan, outlining the connexions and cross-currents between experimental music and the visual arts, similarly covers a full historical spectrum from the New York School and the Abstract Expressionists to Christian Marclay and Martin Creed."

Another text, `Changing the System: Indeterminacy in the 1970s' written for the volume Changing the System: The Music of Christian Wolff (Ashgate, 2010), looked at the compositional procedures of a work by Christian Wolff from the 1970s and its cultural and political ramifications. Professor David Nicholls, an expert in the New York School, reviewed this in Music and Letters (Oxford UP) Vol. 92 no. 4, Nov. 2011, stating that this chapter and one other were the most successful in the book. Ryan prepared the score for a performance of this piece with the composer in 2004 which informs the above publication, and has also led to further performances co-directed by him that explore the music and its spatial, architectural setting in the Basilica San Maggiore in Naples as part of the Namusica festival (June 2013) and previously the Aperto Festival in Reggio Emilia (May 2009 ).

Via di San Teodoro (2010-11, enabled by an Arts Council England Award in 2009) is a film which explores the residence of Italian composer Giacinto Scelsi in Rome creating a relationship between visual and environmental sonic space. It has been screened internationally. The film has its roots in the relationship between the writing and practice. Another film Knots and Fields: New Music at Darmstadt (directed by Andrew Chesher, University of the Arts, London; co-researched, edited, and presented by Ryan) has also been shown at the International Music Institute, Darmstadt, Germany (2010), the Issue Project Space, New York, USA (2011), and at Kettles Yard, Cambridge (2010).

Building on previous work done at the University of the Arts, London (Talking Painting, Routledge , 2002) Ryan has continued his investigations into painting and its relationship to other media. On Painting (2012) a featured article in Art Monthly (AM 355) has been debated in other contexts (see section 5) and featured on the French website de la peinture: un réseau de recherche (www.delapeinture.org). It explored both the idea of time in painting and expanded notions of painting practice, using examples including R.H. Quaytman and Katharina Grosse.

References to the research

3) Ryan: Via di San Teodoro 8 [Film] (2010-11) HDV, 43 mins [Arts Council Funding — peer reviewed equivalent. Grant (£12,500) for the Arts awarded to David Ryan 2009 to enable production] [in REF 2]

Details of the impact

Impact has been achieved within four main areas: a) Public lectures; b) Articles and reviews in practitioners' journals that have influenced debate; c) Video as a medium for cross-over within the diverse audiences for art and music; d) Shaping repertoire and forming concerts at major international festivals.

Various requests and invitations for public lectures by organizations have been received as result of the research: a keynote speaker at Tate Britain's Contemporary Painting and History (2009) (200 attendees), as well as being featured at a high profile public event, Sonic Illuminations (c300 people) exploring the relationship between sound, image and their interrelationship at the British Film Institute where Ryan gave a short talk and introduced three video pieces, one with a live soundtrack. Both events sold out. With the film Via di San Teodoro 8 (2010-11) invited talks have been given at Rome, Brussels, Ghent, and London.

A substantial extract of Via di San Teodoro 8 was included at the Berlin Konzerthaus in a public lecture by Markus Fein, the then dramaturgist of the Berlin Philharmonie who used it to illustrate composer Italian composer Scelsi's aesthetic for the wider public. Here the film was contrasted with an earlier one by director Fred Van De Kooij, Casa Scelsi (1994) and with live performances from the Pelligrini Quartet. This illustrates the use of the research to illluminate the aesthetic of the music through visual media. It was also featured at the Moscow Tchaikovsky Conservatoire (2012) at a festival dedicated to the composer.

Ryan's critical writing on art and music/sonic art have formed the basis of his numerous reviews in Art Monthly, one of the key monthly magazines for practitioners in the fine art field with a circulation of 6,000. Ryan's reviews include exhibitions of Viennese short experimental abstract films (2011/12), Anri Sala at the Serpentine Gallery (2011), reviewed books include Audio Rorschach (2012), Cutting Across Media (2012), Cracked Media (2009), as well as performances of Leafcutter John (2008), and Luigi Nono's Prometeo (2008) at the Southbank Centre. These provide insights across the boundaries of visual art, performance, media and music. His concerns with painting as a discipline have been longstanding, and an extract from Talking Painting (Routledge 2002) was featured in the important Documents of Contemporary Art series with the volume Painting (Whitechapel Gallery/MIT Press 2011). His more recent featured article `On Painting' (2012) for Art Monthly (AM 355) has developed debate amongst practitioners and curators, (resulting in a talk at the Zabludovicz Collection, London) and cited on blogs and essays as a tool for discussing other practitioners.

Ryan's international invitations to realize Christian Wolff's music have shaped performance practices and stem from his published research (2010), In particular his two productions of Changing the System at the Aperto Festival 2009, and Namusica, Naples 2013 where he co-directed and developed the music. Ryan's co-directorship was as follows: David Ryan and Gianni Trovalusci (of CEMAT — Music, Art, Technology, Rome) introduced the work (in English and Italian) in workshop situations for the performers (2009 Ensemble Icarus/2013 Ensemble Dissonanzen). This 2009 performance achieved a very good notice: with a four star review in La Repubblica (Italy's largest daily newspaper circulation: 438,500) musicologist Guido Barbierei found "a work which [...] fully solves the political antagonism of the American composer [...] and in practice `revolutionary', founded on the free creativity of interpreters. From this `listening point' Icarus Ensemble directed by David Ryan and Gianni Trovalusci has offered, on the occasion of the `Aperto' Festival at Reggio Emilia, a musical vision of exuberant, and precise, imagination for sound." On the basis of this Ryan and Trovalusci were invited to Naples to work with another ensemble, developing a similar but specific structure and timescale and also accommodating the very different space of the Basilica San Maggiore for the eight quartets of musicians. Both performances used translated extracts by Ryan based on his 2010 Changing the System text in their programme notes.

The collaboration Knots and Fields (2010) with Dr. Andrew Chesher, University of the Arts, London, was a vehicle to explore sound through visual as well as sonic narratives. Chesher directed, while Ryan co-researched, presented, wrote the interviews, and co-edited. This was described by Christopher Fox in the Guardian newspaper (with a daily circulation of 262,613) as "a fascinating documentary that examines the history of the Darmstadt courses and the ways in which that history still shapes the courses today." Issue project Space a venue in New York which screened it in 2011 acknowledged the amount of research in the film, "Since 2008, British artists Chesher and Ryan have intensely worked with interview and archive material on their film about the Darmstadt Summer Course. "Knots and Fields" documents the history and present activity of this important institution." Projects like Via di San Teodoro and Knots and Fields are as much visual essays as sound portraits and of interest to both music and art audiences. Beneficiaries have included curators in forming public programmes (Aperto 2009, Namusica 2013, Tate Britain 2009, Zabludovicz Collection 2013, South Bank Centre, `The Rest is Noise' series 2013).

Sources to corroborate the impact

1) `We Have Eyes as Well as Ears: Experimental Music and the Visual Arts' 2009
Tim Rutherford Johnson, Review of The Ashgate Companion to Experimental Music, in Tempo, vol.64, 254, p.69, 2010
http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayAbstract?fromPage=online&aid=7913806

2) `On Painting', Art Monthly 2012 featured in practitioner's discussions around painting:
http://www.delapeinture.org/publications/art-monthly/david-ryan

3) `On Painting' 2012
Essay by Stuart Eliot on Alexis Harding:
http://www.mummeryschnelle.com/pages/alexistexts.htm

4) `On Painting' 2012
Online review of Mitch Cairns, New Zealand
http://eyecontactsite.com/2012/06/discussing-painting-without-irony

5) `On Painting' — invitation to speak on the text at Painting in its Supplemental Dimension, Zabludovicz Collection, 2013
http://www.zabludowiczcollection.com/london/events/panel-discussion-painting-and-its-supplemental-dimensions

6) Changing the System — Christian Wolff (co-director with Gianni Trovalusci) — Rec Festival: `Aperto' Reggio Emilia, Italy, 2009
Guido Barbieri, La Repubblica, Italy, October 19 2009, 4 star review
http://ricerca.repubblica.it/repubblica/archivio/repubblica/2009/10/19/wolff-note-di-rivoluzione-il-concerto-diventa.html

7) Changing the System — Christian Wolff (co-Director with Gianni Trovalusci) — Namusica Festival, Basilica San Maggiore, Naples, Italy 2013
http://www.progettosonora.com/progetti_speciali.php?progetto=34

8) Changing the System, Naples 2013
http://www.oltrecultura.it/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=2376:namusica-festival-2013&catid=39:eventi-musica

9) `Via di San Teodoro 8' 2010: http://www.gothicnetwork.org/articoli/suono-nel-suono-di-giacinto-scelsi-profondita-spaziali-del-mondo-musicale

10) Knots and Fields — New Music at Darmstadt (with Andrew Chesher) 2010, Kettles Yard Cambridge/Darmstadt New Music Institute/ Issue Project Space, New York
Christopher Fox, Darmstadt School's British Invasion, Guardian, Feb 11 2010
http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2010/feb/11/darmstadt-music-school-ferneyhough-finnissy